WD 1TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBUZG0010BBK-WESN

After my parents iMac suffered a hard drive failure and their data was miraculously recovered (though it was rather iffy whether this was possible), I decided to buy them the 1TB external HD to use with Time Machine, something built into the OS anyway. For years, they thought I was a bit paranoid in the tin-foil-hat-wearing kind of way about data loss and doing Time Machine backups with my own computer, until it happened to them. If you are not backing up your files semi-regularly, it really is like playing with fire. My parents are not power users but they had a lot more saved onto the hard drive than they thought: meeting minutes, dads small business documents, photos, audiobooks, music, etc. The 1TB size is perfect for them. I added partitions so they use it as an external drive to save stuff as well as have space for Time Machine backups. The external HDs size is perfect because it doesnt take up much desk space but its sturdy enough that if one of them decided to take it along to a meeting or something, it wouldnt be roughed up either. They have been using this for several months now with no issues. Theyre pleased that they dont have to worry about data loss or scheduling backups and should I get a phone call about data loss from them, at least we have backups to restore from.

I bought this hard drive primarily for storing and backing up a vast and ever-expanding collection of personal images and important work documents. This hard drive is replacing a rather dated model that I bought back in 2010 thats been giving me some problems with file corruption. It connects via USB, which is an added convenience for me, and Ive had no, nor do I expect any problems with the device for quite some time. Most of my computer equipment has to put up with some general rough-handling for work out in the field, and so far, this hard drive has taken it like a champ. As far as Western Digital is concerned, Ive never had any problems with their data storage devices after I switched to them from Seagate a few years back. I use several of their Black-series internal hard drives in a RAID enclosure and the warranties they have on their equipment are very attractive to someone whos used to constantly having drives fail. Remember, kids, if its not backed up on at least 3 forms of media, its not backed up at all. Retrospectively, Id probably go back and pick up the 2TB version for the extra $20-or-so, but this little drive seems more than adequate for my purposes.

I bought this drive in order to perform some critical maintenance on my (Mid-2011) MacBook Air. I needed to backup, reformat and restore the SSD. The WD Elements drive worked perfectly. It had no problem running off of the power from a single USB port and although the Air only has USB 2.0 ports, the drive worked fine (although probably slower than it would run if the computer supported USB 3). As the product description said, the drive was pre-formatted for NTFS. I wiped the disk (about 9 hours to write zeros to the entire drive) using the command-line diskutil command. Then I re-partitioned it, and formatted it for HFS+ using Apples Disk Utility. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup of the computers SSD (including the recovery partition) onto the WD drive. Then I booted the from the WD drive (which was a bit slow but worked fine), wiped the SSD and cloned everything back again. I would definitely recommend this drive for others requiring external USB storage for a Mac laptop.

Hace años que lo tengo y funciona muy bien

So far so good! Honestly I havent gotten an external storage drive in a long time. I did not expect it to be as small as it was! This thing is the size of my wallet its awesome. Keep in mind, my wallet is far from large 99% of the time. I know its something small to get excited about, but its super nice and portable. I bought it to use with my Xbox one. I have an original big box, so the 500gb has been filled for awhile and Ive been deleting games for new ones. Finally bought this and I plugged it into my Xbox and it prompted if I wanted to save games or for just media. Setup for games, loading screen, and bam! Im good to go and my storage is expanded! Started to download some of my old games right away. They load quick, I dont notice a difference between the external drive or my Xbox internal games. Will probably buy another larger one later for my computer or maybe upgrade my Xbox storage more! Would recommend to anybody looking for a decent price and reliable storage.

It does what it needs to. Extra storage for my ps5.

I bought this drive to expand the storage capacity of my PlayStation 4. I own a 500gb model, and, although that seems like a lot of storage, it really doesnt go far. It amounts to a few games and some other miscellaneous content. It got to the point where I would have to delete my favorite games, just to play something new. Thats not something that I wanted to continue to do. It took literally 5 seconds to format this drive as an external storage device, and around 20 minutes to transfer most of my games from the PS4 storage to this drive. I transferred roughly 300gb. Now I have plenty of spare memory. The PS4 will automatically use the drive as your storage, unless you choose to revert back to using the PS4 drive. You can switch between drives whenever you wish. So far, this drive works great. Honestly, I cant tell the difference between playing games stored on this drive vs playing them in the PS4 internal drive. Thats exactly what Id hoped for. The drive is very small. I havent noticed much noise while the drive is being used, just a slight hum, and that was with my ear about 2 inches away. I have only one very minor issue with the drive: the annoying blue light that flashes regularly when the drive is in use. This annoyance was easily fixed by facing it towards the wall. Just be aware that if you have it facing toward yourself while in a dark room, you will very aware of the drives presence. Im so glad I bought this drive. It has freed me! I am now able to play all the games I want, without the frustration of having to constantly delete and reinstall my favorite games.

Bought to work with my Tablo OTA recorder. Seems to work fine. Cant comment on speed or performance.

I have had two external USB connected hard drives on my computer, one for regular data backups and the other for use storing the huge temporary files that get created when rendering high definition videos that I produce. Both old drives were a previous version of WD Elements drive, but both were formatted FAT32, which limits maximum file size. I was finding that my video editing software would crash near the end of rendering a new video, because the increasing size of the temporary video file was getting too large for FAT32. Sometimes the resulting video files that I created, which I back up on my computers internal HDD were getting to be too large to back up to the other external drive, also because of FAT32 limitations. Both those drives were about 512 GB capacity. I could have reformatted the old drives to the newer NTFS formatting was one option, but I figured those old drives were about 7 years old, and these new WD Elements 1TB drives were so inexpensive that I decided to retire the old drives and buy two new ones. I bough the Elements series drive instead of WDs other popular series, called Passport, because Passport comes burdened with lots of stuff already on the drive, ostensibly to support features such as automatic data backup and cloud-like; features. WD advertises the Elements series as being targeted at users to prefer just basic data storage, rather like have huge thumb drives(s). Even then, these drives came with some sort of bundled application installed on the drive, and the first thing I did was to delete those, so as to have the full capacity available to me for my purposes. The drive quality seems up to the usual high WD standards. The drives are silent running, unlike my old Elements drives that I could hear whirring away (albeit fairly quietly, but still audible over the noise of the computers fans). These drives are powered over the USB connection, so unlike my older Elements drives, they dont need to be powered from a wall-wart. My only complaint is that the included USB cord is only maybe a foot long or so; I wish they had been at least twice that long. Otherwise a nice drive that I fully expect to be very reliable.

This review is for the 1TB hard drive. Included with the external hard drive are the instructions and a 3.0 USB cable (approximately 18 inches in length). This hard drive does not have/need a power cord as it uses power through the USB cable. One minor issue with this drive is that it doesn’t include any backup software. For me, that isn’t a huge issue as it isn’t necessary for me and backup software is easily accessible online. In comparison to a couple Seagate Expansion 1TB external drives that I purchased a three years ago (both are still going strong), this WD drive’s external casing is nearly the same width and thickness but almost an inch shorter in length, roughly 4.5 inches by 3.25 inches by .5 inch thickness. So, this drive is even more compact and portable than external drives manufactured just a couple years earlier. I have had no issues with either the Seagate brand of drive nor the WD brand as they both make very reliable drives. In this case, the choice was simply based on price (it was 40 dollars at the time of purchase direct from Amazon) and cost per GB. One Seagate drive I mainly use for storing security camera video and the other for music streaming with this WD’s purpose being mainly a backup drive for files. This WD drive connected to my Win 7 computer quickly with no issues at being recognized. I immediately started copying nearly 100 GB of files to this drive. The drive’s transfer rate was quick and the files transferred reliably over the course of 1 to 2 hours. The files included documents, photos, music, and videos. Although some people may like it, I am not crazy about the hard drive read/write light being on the back of the drive next to the USB port. For me, I would prefer to be able to see it on the front, but I can understand some would like the light on the back as it makes it less distracting in low light. These also have a 2-year warranty, which is decent although not as good as the 3-year warranty on the Seagate expansion. I will update my review if I have any issues with durability. 4.5 stars